If you are not familiar with these 3 people and their thesis about education, take the time to catch up.

Entertaining and well-articulated, they will help you understand where the current education system is falling short.

Ken Robinson is more focused on the what – Seth on the why – and Sugata Mitra is looking for an alternative approach (hint: it involves the Internet).

Ken Robinson – School kills creativity

Super famous – and if you never watched it, you should.

Funny, witty and pointing the issues our current schooling system.

Seth Godin – School sucks by design

Seth is mostly known as a marketing and branding expert, but he is much more than that.

In his book the Linchpin, published a few years ago, he talks about the root of the school system, and why it was designed in a certain way.

In this talks he goes on with more details.

Sugata Mitra – Maybe kids don’t need schools

Sugata Mitra is an indian expert on education who run an experiment years ago in India which was called “A whole in the wall” – here is comes back on his experiments and translate it into 4 main thesis which are fundamental to understand how kids (and adults) approach education and self-learning.

That’s it for today.

I will publish more things on this topic. This was more like a reference post for a quick introduction.

Creating a learning process where you transfer experience to one person to an other is not a trivial task.

Else learning would look like this:

But it is not.

So… until then, we have to find other ways to go about it.

Here are some interesting approaches I have stumbled upon, which are really worth having a look at:

Mike Fairclough – the badass

The guy is headmaster of the West Rise School.

He is a kind of a mix between Davy Crockett and Albus Dumbledore.

He runs a primary school in Eastbourne in the UK.

Over there, kids are learning to skin a rabbit or make a campfire or shot guns.

Better I let you watch :

So obviously, not everybody will want their kids to learn these kind of skills.

(However, I am pretty sure all kids would dream to have these kind of activities at school)

In any case, it is a good demonstration that schools can accommodate other ways to teach.

And a big part of responsibility for the change depends on the good will and the skills of teachers and the leadership of the administration.

Studio school – let’s get real

For everyone who ever complained schools don’t remotely provide an environnement to prepare students for work – as in “work the real world” – here is an approach that is exactly trying to do that.

The studio school brings school closer to the reality of a company by organising the entire school around projects and cross-disciplinary teams etc.

The effort was initiated by Geoff Mulgan, a couple of years ago, and it is slowly catching up – you can find Studio schools nearly all across the UK and if you have 6 min, I’d rather have you watch the video than me writing about it.

Mike Row – Dirty Jobs

The third guy is living in the US, and the story is a bit different because it is not about what you do in the school but what you do after school – and how much is school responsible for that – or not.

First, it is important to state that Mike Row is kind of a celebrity in the US, or at least, pretty well known, he has run 8 series of a show on the Discovery channel called “Dirty Jobs” where he does all kind of blue collar jobs. Now, if like me, you don’t live in the US – he is probably not someone you’ve heard about before.

However, whether you know him or not, doesn’t matter much – because the following 40 min is quite an interesting dig into his philosophy on learning, life and education, and not really the kind of thing that is featured on Discovery channel where they have him deal with a lot bullshit (quite literally).

What to take from this

First, I think we can take one thing : it is ok to do things differently – you can still do some pretty amazing things.

Second, eating shit and taking risk is a great way to learn. Especially within a safe framework like school where you can ensure no one get hurt for real along the way.

Third, if you are not mainstream, people will love you or hate you but it will take time before they will follow you, it’s just easier for them to simply judge you.

Last point, the crowd doesn’t matter, you do it for the people who benefit from your work and that is what really matter